It happens every year, one way or another. When the cold air begins to warm, I begin slipping into a kind of frenzy. Every year I tell myself it will be the last one, and when it becomes clear that it won’t be, I have trouble coming to terms with it.

Two years ago, I handled it by spending so many consecutive hours awake that I would end up passing out from exhaustion. That happened once or twice while I was standing. It’s a small miracle that I didn’t break my neck or crack my skull open. But when I did finally wake back up, I went right back to it: reading and rereading, filling up notebooks with mostly illegible nonsense, staying awake by whatever means necessary and trying to force an epiphany.

Last year, I found myself less ignorant than I had been in 2018, though not much better at facing failure. I had a decent enough understanding of how the method began, but not how it could be completed. When Spring began to settle in, so did the panic. I wanted to decide that I could just figure out the future on the fly. That I could start going out and meeting new people while I was still living out of hotel rooms, never mind that I was in no condition to be around anyone, or that I would be in some other town within weeks or days. But after I realized it just wasn’t realistic, I spent most of March and April 2019 too drunk to walk or write in a straight line. My reading comprehension isn’t exactly stellar when I’m shitfaced either, and I probably didn’t achieve much but costing myself more time.

I came pretty close to another pathetic encore this year. At the start of January, knowing exactly what it was going to take to make the future worth living for, I had to admit to myself that it was unlikely to happen before May had arrived once again. At first I think I handled it well enough, focusing on being better off tomorrow than I was today, and so on. But once the pandemic began, all kinds of illogical concerns began taking over; along with the idea that things were about to irreversibly change to an extent that I couldn’t keep up with, panic attacks and binges returned and became routine again.

Then a few weeks ago, Grace and Henry got back in touch for the first time since the night we met, and sent me the things I referenced in the last entry. It did help me to sort of stop the spiral, but the entertainment from the self-help cassette only went so far, and I was perplexed by a couple of their other gifts. Then Grace called me again. I’ll probably never detail much of my interaction with those two, especially in light of my last conversation with Henry, but some of what Grace said has become burned into my brain.

“For one more year, you can survive your ‘happiness’ just being anything but a breakdown. Or a ‘laughing fit’ being any break from the crying you’ve done that day.”

Five years is a long time. But unfulfilled and broken are not the same thing. A promise is a promise.